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EVENTS

[blogathon] Shit People Say To Future Therapists

Today’s my blogathon for the Secular Student Alliance! I’ll be posting every hour starting now until 6 PM central. Don’t forget to donate! To start, you get a rant!

Sometimes I wish I’d kept my career plans a big secret. Maybe if I had, I wouldn’t constantly be having conversations that go like this:

Me: “Wow, I just don’t understand this person.”

Them: “You don’t understand a person?! But you’re going to be a therapist! How can you be a therapist if you don’t understand people?!”

Me: “Sometimes I just don’t have the energy to listen to someone talking about their problems.”

Them: “But you’re going to be a therapist! How could you run out of energy to listen to people talking about their problems?”

Me: “Huh, I really don’t know what you should do in this situation.”

Them: “But you’re going to be a therapist! How could you not be able to give me advice?!”

I understand why people sometimes feel compelled to say these things. I think they stem largely from a misunderstanding of what therapists do and also from what therapists are like as people.

Firstly and most glaringly, these comments are amiss because, clearly, I am not yet a therapist. I have many years of training to go. So the fact that I have not yet developed certain skills that I will need is not, in and of itself, cause for alarm. Either I will develop them over the course of my training, or I will fail to develop them and I will realize that I need to pursue a different career (I have a few backups). But I doubt that that’s the case.

For now, I am trained in just a few specific things: active listening, conflict resolution, sexual health, referring callers to mental health resources, and a suicide prevention protocol known as QPR. That’s it.

I don’t think people realize that while there probably is a certain “type” (or more) of person who becomes a therapist, we’re not born being able to do these skills. We develop them through training and experience. Nobody would ever demand that an undergraduate in a premed track be able to diagnose them with diabetes or cancer. Why should I be able to fix someone else’s emotional troubles?

Second, I think people have this view of therapists as calm, self-assured, eternally tolerant saints who always understand everyone and never feel frustrated with anyone and never tire of listening to painful and difficult things. The reason people have this view is probably 1) this is how good therapists typically behave in therapy sessions, and 2) this is how therapists are typically portrayed in the media, even though there are many styles of therapy that don’t look like this at all. Some are even confrontational!

But that’s not really how it is. Therapists get bored. Therapists get annoyed. Therapists get frustrated. They get overwhelmed and exhausted from listening to people. If they are good at what they do, they don’t show this in therapy–like a good dancer doesn’t show the pain they feel, or a good salesperson keeps smiling and being enthusiastic. Sometimes people doing their jobs have to act in ways other than how they feel. This is normal.

But for therapists, it’s especially important to be mindful of these feelings in oneself rather than trying to tamp them down, because otherwise they can affect how the therapist treats their client. In traditional psychoanalysis, this is called “countertransference,” and while psychoanalysis is quite outdated, the term is still used by respected therapists like Irvin Yalom.

So, personally, if a therapist told me that they neeever get bored or frustrated or annoyed with their clients, that would be a red flag. Nobody that I’ve ever met is such a saint. I would probably conclude that this person is either trying to make themselves look good, or–worse–that they’re not very aware of the negative emotions they sometimes experience during their work.

Of course, I might be wrong. Maybe some people really are like that.

Another misconception is that therapists “just get” people or “just know” the solutions to their problems. This is also false. While therapists are probably more perceptive than the general population, that only really helps when it comes to understanding how a person is feeling, not why they feel that way or what might be the best way for them to change how they feel, as there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to this.

That understanding, if it ever happens, happens after a period of time during which the therapist has gotten to know their client, learned a lot about their background, and started to discern their patterns of thinking. That thing you see in the movies where a therapist “just knows” what’s wrong with you after ten minutes? Nope.

It’s also worth pointing out–as callous as it may seem–that once I become a therapist I will be doing this for money. I will expect to be paid for doing it. When I’m not at work, doing work for free will seem like…not the best use of my time. While I’m sure that I’ll always enjoy listening to my friends talk things out and try to help them feel better, being expected to do so just because I happen to be a therapist is unfair.

I will not be the same person with my friends and family as I am with my clients. This is normal and okay, and it’s the case for basically anyone who has a job that involves working with people. If you want to avoid needlessly annoying and frustrating your friends in the helping professions, try not to expect them to essentially work for free and to act saintly and perfect while doing it.

Comments

Hi, i’ve just started following your blog, and so far, love what I’m reading. I’m curious about a comment above. You say that psychoanalysis is quite outdated.
Why do you say that?
I saw an analytical psychologist for a while, which as you know is Jungian Psychoanalysis. I found it fascinating and extremely helpful, and wasn’t aware that it was particularly outdated.
What would you consider more current therapies?

You mean you’re actually studying something that takes years of work and training and actual effort, instead of just being naturally magically always able to do therapy, no matter if you’ll be on the job or off?

Do these people even realize how much they’re trivializing your hard work and training? Like, it’s a lot more than just nodding and smiling and magical intuition.

Perhaps critics such as you mentioned are looking for “miracle workers”, not trained professionals.

Personally, though you still have years of training yet, if you become a therapist, and I were still alive, and had the funds to spend on a therapist and you practiced where I lived, you would be numero 1 pick to me.

You are already far ahead, form reading your blog, than many others i have known who became therapists, and to whom I would never entrust my innermost thoughts, fears, phobias.

Keep on keeping on, you are a wonderful, radical, thoughtful person, hoping for many more of your thoughts.